Chapter Text
Aikku doesn't know Finnish.
Toni asks her about it one night, when they have some time off, for once. Cuddling together on their couch, Aikku plays with Toni's hair. She loves the colors and wishes she had the courage to dye her hair like that. Sometimes, she gets so lonely without Pod in her head, but Toni can fill some of the holes she left. Or, they left. Pod and Darja.
Aikku's name is a more of a Finnish nickname, rarely used even in the Nordic countries. Her last name, it means 'little river', with 'joki' meaning river and '-nen' making it into a dimunitive. That's pretty much all she knows of Finnish. (Except of course for some swear words, because there is nothing like swearing in your mother tongue and Finnish is a great swearing language)
Her parents went to Norway for a better job, money, life. They had already struggled to learn bokmål/nynorsk and they didn't want to jepardize Aikku's integration into normal Norwegian society. She hasn't really been to Finland, not when she can really remember it. Trying to get Finnish lessons seemed unnecessary while she was at school. Aikku doesn't think there were other ethnic Finnish students around, so it would have been a hassle. Sometimes she and Darja tried to read some of the Finnish books her parents had, but that was mostly for their own weird amusement.
Toni doesn't say much, but Aikku knows she never lost touch with her mother's language even though she was born in America. (Aikku is not as sure about whether Toni knows her father's language, Toni doesn't talk about him)
Aikku is not sure how she feels about the issue. She sometimes gets in moods that seem to be only fixed by Finnish music, even though she doesn't understand the lyrics. Finnish feels... familiar, to her. Must be from hearing her parents speak it to each other but not to her. But she still struggles with English sometimes, and at least both versions of Norwegian and English are related, Germanic languages. Finnish is so different. It seems overwhelmingly different, to her ears. She wishes it wasn't so.
But those thoughts seem even more inappropriate now. Now she is in America. Not quite by her choice, since when she and Pod were together they couldn't always decide where they went. But she's here now, and she wants to stay. Her friends are here, Toni is here. She is building a new life here. When the time comes, she might even apply for citizenship here. Learning Finnish now would be even more useless than it would've been in Norway, and at least Norway and Finland shared a border. And a mountain.
Norway is the country that she misses, that is home and when things get tough, she goes for her Norwegian dialect to express herself. She is trying to use English more and more every day, to get better at it. Finnish has no space in her life right now. Maybe someday. But not now.